Optical microscopy has been and is currently a widely used imaging technique for many fields of research and technology. Various developments are underway in the field of optical microscopy, and two areas of development have been to try to increase the field-of-view (FOV) of optical microscopes in order to obtain a wider angle image of the subject being imaged, and to try to increase imaging resolution in order to see more details in the subject being imaged. However, using conventional methods, in order to significantly increase the FOV of an image in an optical microscope, the imaging resolution suffers as these two parameters are inversely proportional. Therefore, using conventional methods, as one attempts to further increase the FOV, the corresponding imaging resolution decreases. Vice versa, using conventional methods, as one attempts to further increase the imaging resolution, the corresponding FOV decreases.
There also exists fundamental physical factors that limit improvement using conventional methods, such as the diffraction limit, optical aberrations on small scales, and manufacturability of detectors with a sufficiently large active sensor area while maintaining performance parameters such as the noise floor, bit depth, pixel size.
Therefore, what is needed is a technical solution which addresses at least some of the limitations in the prior art, in order to achieve a significant increase in FOV while achieving a very high imaging resolution and while addressing various image degradation resulting from noise and aberrations.